TERMINA. Welcome to the web interpretation of Elizabeth Siegfried's Termina, a photographic installation. The format of this website is intentionally designed to closely mimic the experience of viewing the installation in a gallery setting. The images, on a white background, are arranged as the photographs appear, hanging on white gallery walls. The navigation is simple: you may move forward or back by clicking your mouse on the arrows pointing left and right on the corresponding sides of the installation content. You may also jump to key information by using the top banner menu. For a better view of any photograph, move your pointer and place it upon the thumbnail you wish to enlarge.

This moving exhibition, by Toronto-based photographer Elizabeth Siegfried, is called Termina. Its gently disturbing title comes from Siegfried's decision to come to terms with her own childlessness as the last chapter of what appears here to have been a vivid, joyfully child-filled family history.

The exhibition consists of four gridded tableaux, each containing 16 black-and white photographs, drawn from both still photos and from home movies. “I am fortunate,” Siegfried writes, “to have had a family whose generations have loved taking pictures ... so when I stumbled upon a forgotten box of 16-millimetre film I knew I had discovered something special.”

Siegfried did discover something special, and very touching. She has devoted one gridded mosaic of these film-derived photos (taken from 1922 to 1945) each to her great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother. The fourth grid is Siegfried's own — photos of herself made from 1987 to 1992, plus three recent self-portraits. Her grid is also punctuated with blank, dark spaces, presumably the places that, if things had worked out differently, might have been filled with photos of Siegfried and her children.